The improved Branch Explorer feature available in Plastic SCM offers a global view of the development's evolution, enabling project managers to quantify progress (i.e. what tasks have been integrated into releases, which are pending), integrators to easily track the status of releases (or even perform the integrations) and developers to visually manage their daily task development.

The Branch Explorer available in previous versions of Plastic SCM was an static view, where no actions could be performed on objects, but the improved version available in Plastic SCM allows full interaction with branches, changesets, or even links through their context menus. Display options can be now controlled, like what elements are drawn or the date range of the diagram. Following figure shows a real screenshot of the Branch Explorer in action, and the options available when right-clicking on a branch:

Conditional format

One of the new features of the Branch Explorer is the ability to apply conditional format, based on the user criteria, to elements in the diagram. Users can select any of several conditional format rules, either "branches with pending integrations", or branches queries, where the same syntax of the query system can be applied to highlight branches. The conditional format rules can be "stacked", so they are applied in sequence to the diagram. The following figure of the branch explorer shows the conditional format panel on the right, with 3 different rules, and their respective colors: